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Hacking and Refactoring

16 replies on 2 pages. Most recent reply: Sep 28, 2005 9:17 AM by Christopher L. Marshall

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johnny holmes

Posts: 1
Nickname: bigdaddy
Registered: Sep, 2004

Re: Hacking and Refactoring Posted: Sep 14, 2004 12:23 PM
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> <p>In 2001, there was a history-making conference of
> software-engineering
> thinkers in Snowbird, Colorado. The product of that
> meeting was a remarkable
> document called the <a
> href="http://agilemanifesto.org/">Agile Manifesto</a>,
> a call to overturn many of the assumptions of traditional
> software development.
> I was invited to be at Snowbird, but couldn't make
> it.</p>
>
> <p>Ever since, though, I've been sensing a growing
> convergence between
> agile programming and the open-source movement. I've seen
> agile
> concepts and terminology being adopted rapidly and
> enthusiastically by
> my colleagues in open-source-land—especially ideas like
> refactoring, unit testing, and design from stories and
> personas. From
> the other side, key agile-movement figures like Kent Beck
> and Martin
> Fowler have expressed strong interest in open source both
> in published
> works and to me personally. Fowler has gone so far as to
> <a
> href="http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.h
> tml#N400254">include</a>
> open source on his list of agile-movement schools.</p>
>
> <p>I agree that we belong on that list. But I also agree
> with
> Fowler's description of of open source as a style, rather
> than a
> process. I think his reservations as to whether open
> source can be
> described as just another agile school are well-founded.
> There is
> something more complicated and interesting going on here.
> and I
> realized when I read Fowler's description of open source
> that at some
> point I was going to have to do some hard thinking and
> writing in an
> effort to sort it all out.</p>
>
> <p>While doing research for my forthcoming book, <a
> href="http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/">The Art of
> Unix
> Programming</a>, I read one particular passage in
> Fowler's
> <cite>Refactoring</cite> that finally brought it all home.
> He
> writes:</p>
>
> <blockquote>
> <p>One argument is that refactoring can be an alternative
> to up-front
> design. In this scenario, you don't do any design at all.
> You just
> code the first approach that comes into your head, get it
> working, and
> then refactor it into shape. Actually, this approach can
> work. I've
> seen people do this and come out with a very well-defined
> piece of
> software. Those who support Extreme Programming often are
> portrayed
> as advocating this approach.</p>
> </blockquote>
>
> <p>I read this, and had one of those moments where
> everything comes
> together in your head with a great ringing crash and the
> world assumes
> a new shape—a moment not unlike the one I had in late
> 1996
> when I got the central insight that turned into <cite>The
> Cathedral
> and the Bazaar</cite>. In the remainder of this essay I'm
> going to
> try to articulate what I now think I understand about open
> source,
> agile programming, how they are related, and why the
> connection should
> be interesting even to programmers with no stake in either
> movement.</p>
>
> <p>Now I need to set a little background here, because I'm
> going
> to need to have to talk about several different categories
> which are
> contingently but not necessarily related.</p>
>
> <p>First, there is <em>Unix programmer</em>. Unix is the
> operating
> system with the longest living tradition of programming
> and design.
> It has an unusually strong and mature technical culture
> around it, a
> culture which originated or popularized many of the core
> ideas and
> tools of modern software design. <cite>The Art of Unix
> Programming</cite> is a concerted attempt to capture the
> craft wisdom
>
> of this culture, one to which I have successfully enlisted
> quite a few
> of its founding elders.</p>
>
> <p>Second, there is <em>hacker</em>. This is a very
> complex term, but
> more than anything else, it describes an attitude—an
> intentional stance that relates hackers to programming and
> other
> disciplines in a particular way. I have described the
> hacker stance
> and its cultural correlates in detail in <a
> href="http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html">How
> To Become A
> Hacker</a>.</p>
>
> <p>Third, there is <em>open-source programmer</em>. Open
> source is a
> programming style with strong roots in the Unix tradition
> and the
> hacker culture. I wrote the modern manifesto for it in
> 1997, <a
> href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/">
> The
> Cathedral and the Bazaar</a>, building on earlier thinking
> by
> Richard Stallman and others.</p>
>
> <p>These three categories are historically closely
> related. It is
> significant that a single person (accidentally, me) wrote
> touchstone
> documents for the second and third and is attempting a
> <em>summum
> bonum</em> of the first. That personal coincidence
> reflects a larger
> social reality that in 2003 these categories are becoming
> increasingly
> merged — essentially, the hacker community has become the
> core
> of the open-source community, which is rapidly
> re-assimilating the
> parts of the Unix culture that got away from the hackers
> during
> the ten bad years after the AT&T divestiture in 1984.</p>
>
>
> <p>But the relationship is not logically entailed; we can
> imagine
> a hacker culture speaking a common tongue other than Unix
> and C (in
> the far past its common tongue was Lisp), and we can
> imagine an
> explicit ideology of open source developing within a
> cultural and
> technical context other than Unix (as indeed nearly
> happened several
> different times).</p>
>
> <p>With this scene-setting done, I can explain that my
> first take on
> Fowler's statement was to think "Dude, you've just
> described
> <em>hacking</em>!"</p>
>
> <p>I mean something specific and powerful by this.
> Throwing together
> a prototype and refactoring it into shape is a rather
> precise
> description of the normal working practice of hackers
> since that
> culture began to self-define in the 1960s. Not a complete
> one, but it
> captures the most salient feature of how hackers relate to
> code. The
> open-source community has inherited and elaborated this
> practice,
> building on similar tendencies within the Unix
> tradition.</p>
>
> <p>The way Fowler writes about design-by-refactoring has
> two huge
> implications for the relationship between open source and
> agile
> programming:</p>
>
> <p>First, Fowler writes as though he <em>didn't know he
> was describing
> hacking</em>. In the passage, he appears unaware that
> design by
> repeated refactoring is not just a recent practice
> semi-accidentally
> stumbled on by a handful of agile programmers, but one
> which hundreds
> of thousands of hackers have accumulated experience with
> for over three
> decades and have in their bones. There is a substantial
> folklore, an
> entire craft practice, around this!</em>
>
> <p>Second, in that passage Fowler described the practice
> of hacking
> <em>better than hackers themselves have done</em>. Now,
> admittedly,
> the hacker culture has simply not had that many
> theoreticians, and if
> you list the ones that are strongly focused on development
> methodology
> you lose Richard Stallman and are left with, basically,
> myself and
> maybe Larry Wall (author of Perl and occasional funny and
> illuminating
> ruminations on the art of hacking). But the fact that we
> don't have a
> lot of theoreticians is itself an important datum; we have
> always
> tended to develop our most important wisdoms as
> unconscious and
> unarticulated craft practice.</p>
>
> <p>These two observations imply an enormous mutual
> potential, a gap
> across which an arc of enlightenment may be beginning to
> blaze. It
> implies two things:</p>
>
> <p>First, <em>people who are excited by agile-programming
> ideas can
> look to open source and the Unix tradition and the hackers
> for the
> lessons of experience</em>. We've been doing a lot of the
> stuff the
> agile movement is talking about for a <em>long</em> time.
> Doing it in a
> clumsy, unconscious, learned-by-osmosis way, but doing it
> nevertheless. I believe that we have learned things that
> you agile
> guys need to know to give your methodologies groundedness.
> Things
> like (as Fowler himself observes) how to manage
> communication and
> hierarchy issues in distributed teams.</p>
>
> <p>Second, <em>open-source hackers can learn from agile
> programmers
> how to wake up</em>. The terminology and conceptual
> framework of
> agile programming sharpens and articulates our instincts.
> Learning to
> speak the language of open source, peer review, many
> eyeballs, and
> rapid iterations gave us a tremendous unifying boost in
> the late
> 1990s; I think becoming similarly conscious about
> agile-movement ideas
> like refactoring, unit testing, and story-centered design
> could be
> just as important for us in the new century.</p>
>
> <p>I've already given an example of what the agile
> movement has to
> teach the hackers, in pointing out that repeated redesign
> by
> refactoring is a precise description of hacking. Another
> thing we can
> stand to learn from agile-movement folks is how to behave
> so that we
> can actually develop requirements and deliver on them when
> the
> customer isn't, ultimately, ourselves.</p>
>
> <p>For the flip side, consider Fowler's anecdote on page
> 68-69, which
> ends "Even if you know exactly what is going on in your
> system,
> measure performance, don't speculate. You'll learn
> something, and
> nine times out of ten it won't be that you were right."
> The Unix guy
> in me wants to respond "Well, <em>duh!</em>". In my
> tribe, profiling
> <em>before</em> you speculate is DNA; we have a strong
> tradition of
> this that goes back to the 1970s. From the point of view
> of any old
> Unix hand, the fact that Fowler thought he had to write
> this down is a
> sign of severe naivete in either Fowler or his readership
> or both.</p>
>
> <p>In reading <cite>Refactoring</cite>, I several times
> had the
> experience of thinking "What!?! That's obvious!" closely
> followed
> by "But Fowler explains it better than Unix traditions
> do..." This may
> be because he relies less on the very rich shared
> explanatory context
> that Unix provides.</p>
>
> <p>How deep do the similarities run? Let's take a look at
> what the
> Agile Manifesto says:</p>
>
> <p><em>Individuals and interactions over processes and
> tools.</em> Yeah,
> that sounds like us, all right. Open-source developers
> will toss out
> a process that isn't working in a nanosecond, and
> frequently do, and take
> gleeful delight in doing so. In fact, the reaction
> against heavyweight
> process has a key part of our self-identification as
> hackers for
> at least the last quarter century, if not longer.</p>
>
> <p><em>Working software over comprehensive
> documentation.</em> That's
> us, too. In fact, the radical hacker position is that
> source code of
> a working system <em>is</em> its documentation. We, more
> than any
> other culture of software engineering, </p>
>
> <p><em>Customer collaboration over contract
> negotiation.</em> In the
> open-source world, the line between "developer" and
> "customer" blurs
> and often disappears. Non-technical end users are
> represented by
> developers who are proxies for their interests—as when,
> for
> example, companies that run large websites second
> developers to
> work on Apache Software Foundation projects.</p>
>
> <p><em>Responding to change over following a plan.</em>
> Absolutely.
> Our whole development style encourages this. It's fairly
> unusual for
> any of our projects to <em>have</em> any plan more
> elaborate than "fix
> the current bugs and chase the next shiny thing we
> see".</p>
>
> <p>With these as main points, it's hardly surprising that
> so many of
> the <a
> href="http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html">Principles
>
> behind the Agile Manifesto</a> read like Unix-tradition
> and hacker
> gospel. "Deliver working software frequently, from a
> couple of weeks
> to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter
> timescale.
> Well, yeah—we <em>pioneered</em> this. Or "Simplicity—the
> art of
> maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential."
> That's
> Unix-tradition holy writ, there. Or "The best
> architectures,
> requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing
> teams."</p>
>
> <p>This is stone-obvious stuff to any hacker, and exactly
> the sort of
> subversive thinking that most panics managers attached to
> big plans,
> big budgets, big up-front design, and big rigid
> command-and-control
> structures. Which may, in fact, be a key part of its
> appeal to
> hackers and agile developers—because at least one thing
> that points
> agile-movement and open-source people in the same
> direction is a drive
> to take control of our art back from the suits and get out
> from under
> big dumb management.</p>
>
> <p>The most important difference I see between the hackers
> and the
> agile-movement crowd is this: the hackers are the people
> who never
> surrendered to big dumb management — they either bailed
> out of the
> system or forted up in academia or inustrial R&D labs or
> technical-specialty areas where pointy-haired bosses
> weren't permitted
> to do as much damage. The agile crowd, on the other hand,
> seems to be
> composed largely of people who were swallowed into the
> belly of the
> beast (waterfall-model projects, Windows, the entire
> conventional
> corporate-development hell so vividly described in David
> Yourdon's
> books) and have been smart enough not just to claw their
> way out but
> to formulate an ideology to justify not getting sucked
> back in.</p>
>
> <p>Both groups are in revolt against the same set of
> organizational
> assumptions. And both are winning because those
> assumptions are
> obsolete, yesterday's adaptations to a world of expensive
> machines and
> expensive communications. But software development
> doesn't need big
> concentrations of capital and resources anymore, and
> doesn't need the
>
> control structures and hierarchies and secrecy and
> elaborate rituals
> that go with managing big capital concentrations either.
> In fact, in
> a world of rapid change, these things are nothing but a
> drag. Thus
> agile techniques. Thus, open source. Converging paths to
> the same
> destination, which is not just software that doesn't suck
> but a
> software-development <em>process</em> that doesn't
> suck.</p>
>
> <p>When I think about how the tribal wisdom of the hackers
> and the
> sharp cut-the-bullshit insights of the agile movement seem
> to be
> coming together, my mind keeps circling back to Phil
> Greenspun's brief
> but trenchant essay <a
> href="http://tinyplanet.ca/projects/professionalism.html">R
> edefining
> Professionalism for Software Engineers</a>. Greenspun
> proposes,
> provocatively but I think correctly, that the shift
> towards
> open-source development is a key part of the
> transformation of
> software engineering into a mature profession, with the
> dedication to
> excellence and ethos of service that accompanies
> professionalism. I
> have elsewhere suggested that we are seeing a close
> historical analog
> of the transition from alchemy to chemistry. Secrets leak
> out, but
> skill sustains; the necessity to stop relying on craft
> secrecy is one
> of the crises that occupational groups normally face as
> they attain
> professional standing.</p>
>
> <p>I'm beginning to think that from the wreckage of the
> software
> industry big dumb management made, I can see the outline
> of a mature,
> <em>humane</em> discipline of software engineering
> emerging — and
> that it will be in large part a fusion of the
> responsiveness and
> customer focus of the agile movement with the wisdom and
> groundedness
> of the Unix tradition, expressed in open source.</p>

garbage
of course you old-timers are always right!
of course you've been doing it that way for years!
HA!
look, trying to bend XP and use it as a justification for diarrhea-coding that is untestable and unmaintainable without completely re-writing it (ok, call it "refactoring") is missing the point. XP wants you to know what the target is and develop the tests for it before you puke out your slop. Hackers have never done that, and never will. Any 3rd-grader can get a program "to work", but that's not a test!

What's your point anyway? Just patting yourself on the back? Don't try and glom on to XP by reinterpreting old methodologies. Take your "unarticulated craft practice" and test it, if you can formulate a test plan.

Finally, saying we "emphasize program source code as human-to-human communication that is expected to bind together communities of cooperation and understanding distributed through time and space. In this, too, we build on and amplify Unix tradition." is a steaming pile. Ever heard of a man page? all the unix tools have man pages, so upon what unix tradition are you building?
nice try ...

Christopher L. Marshall

Posts: 6
Nickname: chrism22
Registered: Sep, 2005

Re: Hacking and Refactoring Posted: Sep 28, 2005 9:17 AM
Reply to this message Reply
> garbage
> of course you old-timers are always right!
> of course you've been doing it that way for years!
> HA!
> look, trying to bend XP and use it as a justification for
> diarrhea-coding that is untestable and unmaintainable
> without completely re-writing it (ok, call it
> "refactoring") is missing the point. XP wants you to know
> what the target is and develop the tests for it before you
> puke out your slop. Hackers have never done that, and
> never will. Any 3rd-grader can get a program "to work",
> but that's not a test!
>
> What's your point anyway? Just patting yourself on the
> back? Don't try and glom on to XP by reinterpreting old
> methodologies. Take your "unarticulated craft practice"
> and test it, if you can formulate a test plan.

What's your point anyway? That the unix programming traditions haven't produced anything worth mentioning?

The BSD unicies, The linux kernel, sendmail, apache, gcc, the gimp, ...

Hmmm. If the unix tradition is that bad, how did it produce such a large body of code of such high quality?

As far as testing goes, I think the concept of test driven development has many implications. one of which is that programs and groups of programs meant to work together (as in a kernel and its related userspace utilities) should be written so that their inner workings can be inspected and tinkered with easily, without having to understand every last detail of the inner workings.

The design of Unix, its virtual filesystem, and its utilities is amazing in that regard. There are so many ways to inspect what is going on and learn about it. It is much more testable than other operating systems not heavily based on it or inspired by it.

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